Looking for Beauty

A compulsion to walk out to the garden and look at the orange trumpet vine in profuse bloom came to me yesterday afternoon. I picked up my camera and went to sit for a while by a large old vine at the edge of the garden. The hummingbirds were fighting over who gets to drink of her sweet nectar. I counted four and snapped photos of all of those I saw zooming in and around radiant blooms.

Joy began to creep into my heart once again. The simple (?!) act of focusing on what is good and true and beautiful shifted my vision from the smoke plumes, where the latest fire front is ravaging the forest, the engines coming and going, the terror of
back burning or back firing or firing or whatever new term is used to set the mountains on fire in an experiment to contain large scale fire events that won't be extinguished until large rain events occur....whenever this may be in a decades long  drought trend in California....to sit, to notice, to FOCUS on beauty is a choice which brought an enormous measure of relief to my heart. This is something I CAN do.